In a group meeting scenario 100 as shown in FIG. 1, participants 110, 112, 114, 116, 118 discuss, negotiate, present, and create among each other. Most meetings, for example, can be conducted with participants seated on chairs around a table, and occasionally a participant stands in front of a display to present. In addition, more and more meetings are being conducted in distributed situations, for example, via video conferencing, wherein participants are at two or more locations, and not every participant is visible during the presentation or meeting. For example, one or more participants may be hidden at any time during the meeting.
Depending on the group dynamic and the specific activity participants express during the meeting, varying mental states in the group activity are often not accurately observed. For example, the different mental states in the group for each participant can include states of interest such as engagement, stress, attention, excitement, agreement, and/or disagreement.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to understand the varying mental or user states of each individual user or participant and the aggregated group state collocated as distributed in order to improve meeting quality.